We are writing to solicit several 5000-word responses to Brent HayesEdwards's _The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and theRise of Black Internationalism_, to be published bilingually in theUnited States and France in 2005.

In _The Practice of Diaspora_, Edwards has proposed that interwar blackliterary and cultural studies should be reconfigured towards aninternational perspective, one in which diaspora is figured in an"anti-abstractionist" manner. Edwards organizes an expansive archiveof materials, one that notably privileges periodicals as salientinternational texts, as a means of configuring black internationalismas a series of practices. Intellectual labor is thus often locatedwithin the "necessary misrecognitions," productive and otherwise, amongdifferent black people's crossings in metropolitan spaces, preeminentlyParis.

We seek responses that reflect and expand upon the critical themes ofthe book, responses that engage both with Edwards's specific studies(of Ren=E9 Maran, of Paulette Nardal, of George Padmore), but also speakto and debate more generally the book's implications for futurestudies. What are the possibilities and limitations ofinterdisciplinary work? What role do literature and literary studiesplay in adjacent fields such as anthropology or history? Should thearchive be privileged as a source for work in twentieth-centurystudies? What does it mean for diaspora to be configured as a set ofsingular (if interrelated) practices? Does the future of postcolonialstudies lie in an internationalization of subaltern studies? What arepossible responses to the book's periodization?